Abstract
Throughout domestication processes, phenotypic and genetic differentiations have occurred both under environment and human selection pressures. Clear phylogeographic structuration has been stated in apricot, and the challenge for the breeders is to fine tune tools capable of valorizing the available phenotypic and genetic variability both for methodological studies and selection purposes. Micro-array have been developed for peach, peach-related species and cherry, but none are available on plum and apricot. Exon capture strategy has been implemented to give the opportunity to target genes and regions of interest in the genome. Targeted capture provides an efficient and sensitive tool to access genome exons polymorphism in a high-throughput manner. Two approaches were used: one by designing one or two capture probes (in 5’and 3’ UTR of genes) , called baits, on all 37521 Prunus armeniaca Marouch v3 genes (Groppi A et al, 2021) and the other by design ten baits distributed over the coding regions of targeted candidate genes (1981 candidats genes) already described in the prunus literature. A total set of 60,000 80-base baits has been obtained.Initially, the set of baits has been tested on two complementary gene-pools of fourty-eight accessions, one representing apricot genetic diversity and the other recombinants lines. The results were completely in line with the expectations express a huge level of polymorphism suitable for genetic diversity analysis, and biparental population analyses and also suitable for genomic selections studies.